First, there's the short-term questions, such as: What will Donald Trump say to rally goers on the eve of arguably the most consequential Senate races in a generation and just one day after he was caught on tape trying to steal the election?
Then there's the short-term questions with long-term implications: Will Trump's cultists turn out to try to secure control of an institution they don't actually believe in by Republican politicians they don't actually trust? Will the Senate GOP's bald-faced backing of Trump's coup attempt repel conservative-leaning suburban voters who would still like to preserve some semblance of American democracy? And will youth voters—who played a pivotal role in President-elect Joe Biden's Georgia victory—continue to flex the muscle of a juggernaut generation that could help upend the current electoral map?
These are giant question marks with huge stakes, and anyone who tells you they know the answers to them is quite simply full of it. But over the course of the next couple weeks we will get our first glimpses into how those questions manifest at the ballot box and what the results could mean in the next several election cycles.
To top off all the suspense, the Georgia runoffs have provided more heart-stopping twists and turns than a loop-the-loop roller coaster ride right up till the very end. GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue chose early to jump on the Trump coup train and go to war with their own Republican colleagues in the state. Trump launched a fusillade of conspiracies about the Georgia results on a daily basis as he called for resignations and future primary challenges of state GOP officials. Threats of death and violence hovered over the entire spectacle, and eventually divided the Senate Republican caucus into two exceedingly stark camps: Team democracy vs. Team coup. We still don't know exactly where all those chips will fall until the votes are counted following the joint congressional session to certify the election on Wednesday. And we probably won't know which party will control the Senate and, with it, the fate of the Joe Biden's first-term agenda for a week or two following Tuesday's vote.
But one person who concluded she wanted Georgians to know she was definitively on Team coup in advance of the runoff was Sen. Loeffler. After weeks of dodging the question on whether she would join a dozen GOP senators in challenging the Electoral College results on Wednesday, Loeffler issued a statement saying she would indeed hop on the coup bandwagon just hours before Trump was scheduled to deliver an epic pre-vote rant on Monday night. Apparently, Loeffler was convinced that Trump might kneecap her unless she made her intentions known. Perdue has also said he supports Team coup but that he technically won’t be certified to take part in the proceedings when the issue comes up on Wednesday.
Earlier Monday, Markos did a post analyzing the data on what we know so far about the early vote and which party it may or may not favor. He also continually emphasized what a wild card these two runoffs continue to be.
But given the questions I posed above about conservative suburbanites and youth voters, I wanted to highlight just a couple anecdotal reports from the Washington Post, which has delivered some very solid coverage of the election.
Here's two quotes from one-time GOP moderate voters in Georgia who are starting to conclude there's simply no room for them in the current Republican party anymore.
Lifelong GOP leaner Shauna Mosher, 37, of suburban Atlanta said of Loeffler/Perdue backing Trump's coup attempt: "If they have the taste of Trump ... they're kind of poison in my mind." Mosher, who voted for Biden, also cast early votes for Democrats John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
Carter Crenshaw, a Republican who founded a group called GOP for Joe, also early voted for the Democrats: “What keeps us from truly jumping ship and leaving, and just saying we are done, is, I think, that there is some hope that the party will rebuild itself,” he said. "But you know, I do think that it does become more and more evident every day that I don’t think that will happen anytime soon.”
The Post also did a piece on the sustained enthusiasm of youth voters in the Peach State that quoted George Lefkowicz, who was 14 when Trump was elected and turned 18 several days after the Nov. 3 election. Lefkowicz is exactly the type of voter Democrats had targeted with GOTV effort and he had also cast his very first votes for the two Democratic challengers ahead of Tuesday. “If you ask young people back in 2013, we wouldn’t really be caring about a government shutdown over the debt ceiling,” he explained his generation's previous apathy. “But when you have a president on Twitter who’s going insane, it’s a little easier for the young population to digest.”
Again, none of this is definitive in terms of Tuesday's elections. But the material does add definition to the questions that will continue to shape the next several election cycles.
Stay tuned.